Graduation Address

"Lord Beaverbrook's career cited by Hon. C.D. Howe" Daily Gleaner (15 May 1948). (UA Case 67, Box 1)

My first words must be to thank the President and The Senate of the University of New Brunswick for the honour being paid to those of us who are receiving Honorary Degrees at today's Convocation. An Honorary Degree may not carry with it the validity of an earned degree, but nevertheless it enables the recipient to be numbered among the graduates of this University. We are proud of our new association, and are looking forward to close and frequent contacts with our fellow alumni. I hope each of us will prove to be a type of alumnus that can be counted on to lend a hand whenever the University needs our help.

I congratulate those of you who are being graduated here today. Many of you are veterans of the last war, who have now completed your college training. You are fortunate in that you are entering your chosen career at a time when Canada is in the midst of a period of unprecedented expansion, a period when your services are bound to be in demand. I had the unfortunate experience of graduating in the midst of the so-called "rich man's panic" of 1907, when jobs for graduates were few and far between, and I have a vivid recollection of the difficulty of the graduates of that day in finding employment. In a prosperous and dynamic society, which is the Canada of today, there should be many ladders by which youth, with varied talents, can reach satisfying employment.

You are fortunate in having obtained your training in the Maritime Provinces. It has always seemed to me that the atmosphere of the Maritimes is particularly favourable to higher education. Most of you come from homes where hard work and frugal living are the accepted order. As students, you have been free from the pressures and diversions that are inevitable in the larger cities. The splendid record of graduates from Maritime universities is an indication of the advantages of a smaller student body, as compared with enormous numbers, that are presently found in our larger universities.

Forty years have passed since I came to the Maritime Provinces, as a very young professor of engineering in a neighbouring university. While I have some doubt about the quality of my teaching, I have no doubt that my associations in the university taught me a great deal that has been of value in later years. I can say to any of you who intend to make teaching your career, that you will find it a satisfying life. I also suggest that you will learn as much from your associates and from your students as you are likely to impart to your students. At least, that was my experience in teaching.

I hope you have all decided upon the career that you intend to follow. It is helpful at all time to have a target or an objective toward which to strive. I hope yours is a high objective, for there is an excellent chance that you will attain whatever objective you choose, always provided you will keep that objective constantly in mind and bend every effort to its attainment. I have had three associates who have told me that, in their youth, they had the ambition to be Prime Minister of Canada. None of the three have attained that objective in full, perhaps due to the fact that vacancies in that office have been few, but all three did become Members of the Federal Cabinet. It may interest you that one of the three did not have the advantage of a college education, but nevertheless, he became Premier of his Province, as well as a senior member of the Federal Cabinet.

President Eliot of Harvard, was accustomed to repeat a phrase that years ago impressed itself on my mind: "The durable satisfaction of life." I commend that phrase to you who are planning your future careers. Let the objective you set for yourself be one which, if attained, will bring to you the durable satisfaction of life. None other is worth while. Each of you will have your own thoughts regarding the durable satisfactions that will mean most to you, but it is well to give thought to what they are, and to shape your life accordingly.

I have perhaps had exceptional opportunities to know and study successful men, after being a college professor, a free lance consulting engineer, and for thirteen years a Member of the Federal Government, I have given some thought to the qualities that bring men to the top. It may interest you to have my views on the attributes that men who have attained the durable satisfactions of life have in common.

The first, and probably the most important attribute of successful men, is character. In the final reckoning what one is counts for more than what one does. Twenty-three hundred years ago Plato, in his Republic, said that the ultimate aim of education is training of character. His words are just as true today as they were then. It seems to me that education in the Maritime Provinces has continued to place emphasis on the training of character, in a period when larger universities have tended to swing the emphasis elsewhere.

Canada has learned to expect the men of the Maritime Provinces to be men of character. It has been my good fortune to know intimately your public men of the present generation: Ralston, Ilsley, Michaud, McNair, Bridges, Gregg, Macdonald, to name only a few. One common description fits them all: men of character, good men, honourable men. Needless to say, they are also men of great ability, but, as public men, their high character has won them their greatest public acclaim. Therefore, I say to you, take heed of your character and good repute, for otherwise, the durable satisfactions of life may not come your way.

The second most important attribute of successful men, is that they have acquired special skills or special knowledge. The durable satisfactions of life come from an ability to do things well. A man who can do well some worth while thing is always in demand. A man capable of honest thinking can almost name his own price for his services.

Honest thinking is thinking based on full knowledge. It is sometimes said that students should not be expected to learn facts; they should be taught to think. The truth of the matter is that unless a man has at his command and can assemble the relevant facts, his thinking cannot produce anything worth while. Thinking can result in the emergency of a sound idea only after all relevant facts have been collected and examined. Even then, the idea can be wrong until it has been well tested. Thinking is a highly dangerous performance for amateurs. Every fact that can be stored in the mind, and every experience that can be remembered, help to build the basis for honest thinking. Even our mistakes can be turned to good account, as a background for future decisions. The successful man is one who does his thinking with a well trained and well filled mind. Hard facts and hard practice must form the background of his skill, and these are not acquired easily or quickly.

Your search for the durable satisfactions of life can be helped greatly by an ability to write well and to speak well. Sir William Fyfe, in his report on education in Scotland, included these words: "To fail in Mathematics or Latin is to be deficient in those subjects; to fail in English is to be fundamentally uneducated." Most cultured Englishmen speak and write better than we do, doubtless because of their greater familiarity with literature. Winston Churchill is perhaps the greatest orator of our time, as well as one of our great writers. You who have listened to his speeches and read his books will be aware of the extent to which he draws from his treasury of remembered literature and poetry.

I recently came across a quotation from an English writer which sums up the situation in the following words: "Literature is not a mere science to be studied, but an art to be practiced. By all means let us study the old masters of the past, but let us study them for our guidance, that we, in our turn, having (it is to be hoped) something to say in the span of our time, may say it worthily."

Perhaps the rarest talent of all, and the most difficult to acquire, is the talent for eloquence. I am sorry to say that oratory is becoming a lost art in this country. In the darkest hours of the war, the eloquence of Churchill was able to lift the British people and spur them on to great deeds. It is all too seldom that men now in our public life deliver stirring speeches, and I regret to say that few men capable of real eloquence are found outside the ranks of our elder statesmen. Practice in public speaking is an effort well worth while and one that will richly repay men who develop an ability in that direction.

This is a bilingual country and if ability to use the English language is valuable, an ability to use both the English and French language is doubly valuable. Men capable of using both languages well and accurately command a high premium in this country, in business and in the professions.

Please do not think that because of your college degree, you have an insuperable advantage over those who have not had the advantage of a college education. I could give you many examples of men who have never been college students, and yet have succeeded greatly. We have on this platform one of those men, in the person of your Chancellor, Lord Beaverbrook, who spent his boyhood not far from here. Lord Beaverbrook has always been possessed of dynamic energy, high ambitions, and a great urge to make anything he may come in contact with bigger and better. As a young man, he was combining small businesses into great corporations. He moved to England and there acquired a newspaper. He improved its appeal to readers so effectively that it has now the greatest circulation of any daily newspaper in the world.

Perhaps his greatest gift is his ability to goad other men into doing more than they think possible. I saw something of Lord Beaverbrook and his work during the last war. I witnessed his drive for greater airplane production, and have some knowledge of the methods he used to induce manufacturers to step up their output far beyond the known capacities of their factories. Back in 1942, I spent a week with him in Washington, and heard him inspire the leaders in the United States war effort to higher targets for the production of munitions. I have never ceased to marvel that a man from another country could so profoundly have changed a munitions program that was all but settled. We all know of his impact on the public life of England during a period that included two World Wars. As a very recent alumnus of this University, I am holding my breath until I see the results of his great talents now being applied to its advancement.

If you will ponder the career of your Chancellor, it will be difficult for any of you to conclude that the world is lacking in opportunities for those willing to make the effort.

You may be disposed to enquire where in Canada these opportunities can be found. My answer is - almost everywhere. An expanding overall economy demands expansion in all its parts. Canada needs huge scale development of low cost power, which is the life-blood of our industry. We need more and better homes, and after that a major job of slum clearance. Important discoveries of iron ore and base metals are awaiting development of fill an urgent demand. Better utilization of our agricultural lands will help feed a growing population and maintain the volume of our exports. Ours forest industries are booming and our forest resources urgently need the protection of reforestation and better planning. Industry needs more trained scientists. With all this goes the need for more doctors, more nurses, more business men, more factory managers. Today our expansion is limited only by lack of man-power. You and other graduates from our universities represent our pool of well trained recruits.

Along with new recruits from our universities, Canada requires additional manual workers, both trained and untrained. With this in mind, the Government is encouraging large-scale selected immigration. Citizens of the United Kingdom and of the United States are fee to come to Canada on their own initiative, and I am happy to say that the immigration from the United Kingdom is taxing the capacity of available transportation. Among these immigrants are a good proportion of skilled mechanics. In addition to immigrants from the two sources named, the Government is co-operating with the International Relief Organization by taking as many displaced persons from Europe as available transportation will permit. These latter immigrants are carefully selected, as suitable for the particular occupation to which they are destined, and are being routed to industries under an agreement that employment and suitable housing are guaranteed for a period of one year. This flow of immigration is rapidly being absorbed, and is making a considerable contribution to the strength of the Canadian economy. Recently, the Government, in co-operation with Trans-Canada Air Lines, has instituted a movement of immigrants by air, which will result in a substantial increase in the flow of immigrants to Canada.

With our vast areas and our wealth of natural resources, Canada is capable of supporting a population much larger than our present twelve million people. There is an urgent need throughout the world for the natural products that we have in abundance. To play our part in the world economy, we should be developing our resources more rapidly than our limited population will permit. If we can hope to hold these resources indefinitely, we must do our best to get on with their development.

When the war was nearing an end, the Government took steps designed to stimulate the Canadian economy in order to make possible the return to peace-time employment of the million men and women then engaged in war-time pursuits. That proved to be a very difficult task. The demand for everything was so great that within a period of three years it has become necessary to restrict too rapid expansion in order to prevent bankruptcy in our foreign exchange position. On one who is aware of the current pressures for expansion can be a pessimist about the future of Canada.

There are anxious days for those responsible for government in Canada. Our high ideals for a peaceful world have not been realized. The threat of Communist aggression is abroad in Europe and menaces the peace of the world. The rebuilding of war devastated countries is proceeding much more slowly than had been expected. Much will depend upon the European Recovery Program of Secretary of State Marshall which is offering new hope to those countries in Europe that are resisting the spread of Communism. I have faith that we shall be wise enough to escape a global war. I likewise believe that Canada will move forward to still greater strength and prosperity.

I hope that some of you, in planning your careers, are giving thought to taking part in the public life of Canada. I can assure you that no more absorbing and interesting occupation can be found. Government today is big business, and involves all the problems that face the man of business. In the work of Government, there is scope for many talents. In fact, a Government to be successful, must be made up of men with a combination of talents, just as it must be representative of every section and interest of the country that it presumes to govern. I am sure that Lord Beaverbrook will be glad to confirm my opinion that government is the most absorbing and interesting of all occupations. The life of a politician has its ups and downs, its victories and disappointments, but you may have noticed that few men retire from it voluntarily. The plain fact of the matter is that after a few years of service in government, any other occupation seems dull and uninteresting by comparison.

I will have no doubt that many of you will have opportunities to enter public life. Do not lightly reject such an opportunity.

You who are graduating here today have it in your power to play a great part in this expanding country of ours. Canada was never in greater need of college graduates with energy and ambition. We older men envy you the years that lie ahead, with their opportunities for service and adventure. I wish to every one of you success in the attainment of the durable satisfactions of life.